Politics

September 09, 2015

What makes a story? Media mangers makes hundreds of decisions daily about what to cover and what not cover. In this audio interview Scott Radley @radleyatthespec and I discuss why Apple will receive a barrage of attention today from media in its latest product. You can the interview here: Media bites the big Apple

September 03, 2015

In 2012 a Pakistani schoolgirl named Malala Yousafzai was shot by a Taliban gunman who tried to execute and silence her. She was outspoken, wrote a blog and advocated the right to education for girls. The assassination attempt brought new focus to Taliban oppression and atrocities. A gunman going after a young girl - the world took notice.

It is the reporting equivalent of a new Reuters photo published around the world of a three-year-old Syrian boy drowned and washed up on a Turkish beach, one of thousands of desperate men, women and children fleeing war-torn Syria.

Newspapers around the world published the dramatic and heart-breaking photo, on Page One and on inside pages. The Spec didn’t publish the photo. Some argue we should: They say it is a disturbing photo that is a true reflection of reality. It is news. Others counter it reflects a true event, but they don’t need to see the photo to understand what is going on. They hear about it, read it, but do not need to see the body of a dead child.

As a general rule, at the Spec, we don't run photos of dead bodies. Our experience is readers say they don't like graphic images forced on them. There are no easily defined rules. We have run photos of dead bodies: a moving photo of a New York city fire chaplain being carried out on a chair during the 9/11 attack comes to mind. The Spec published a highly stylized photo of a dead infant as part of a feature that documented coping with the loss of a baby.

We heard from a number of readers when we published a photo of a dead coyote. The coyote was near children and in a neighborhood and police shot the animal. We faced similar outrage when we published photos of a dead bear and horse. The bear was shot members of the Halton police tactical team; the horse was killed after it collided with a truck, also killing a young woman in the truck. In all cases, readers reacted negatively and said they did not value the spot news photos.

At the newspaper our job is to inform and build society. We want to improve people's lives. Along the way we have and do offend people's sensibilities. The photo of the three-year-old Syrian boy, like Malala’s story, is sure to become a touchstone that changed how this refugee/migrant crisis is viewed.

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Quotes from conversations I’ve had with people today go like this:

“I don’t have a problem with the photo. It’s not gratuitous.”

I don’t need to or want to see the photo. Don’t force it on me, I get what is going on.”

“How could you show this? It is a dead child.”

“How can you not print this? “It captures the tragedy in one second.”

“Suddenly now the media is interested because of a good photo?” (I understand the sentiment, although that statement is not accurate. Media have been paying attention to the crisis, some more than others. True, though, the photo added a new spark.)

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This photo adds to the long and subjective debate about how newspapers use photos of dead bodies and moments that changed the conversation around a topic:

Among them: A Vietnamese child fleeing after being hit with napalm, a 20-year-old Kent State student was shot and killed by the National Guard, Saigon – a photo that shows a police chief shooting a member of a Vietcong death squad in the head. Interesting in the last photo, it changed how Americans viewed the war in Vietnam. The photographer, Eddie Adams, won a Pulitzer for the photo.

Interesting though, he had regrets about the photo, as he wrote in 1998 for Time magazine:

“Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. … What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?’…. This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time. … I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, “I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes.”